How Does Queerness Fit Into the US Census?

How does a data set like the US census deal with people who defy its expectations? The 1940 manuscript census schedules record the results of conversations that took place across millions of doorsteps as over 120,000 census takers spanned the nation and started asking questions. They tell us, for instance, that an enumerator named Richard Gray visited Scattergood’s house in Fairfax County, Virginia, on May 25, 1940. Gray then listed three residents: 57-year-old Florence Thorne, white, single, with four years of college education, the “assistant editor” for a “labor union”; 45-year-old Margaret Scattergood, white, single, college educated, and a “researcher” for a “labor union”; and 50-year-old May Stotts Allen, divorced and entirely unschooled—she was listed as “W” for white, which was then scratched over with a darker “Ng” for “Negro.” Gray was supposed to mark which of the people in the household he spoke to directly, but he did not in this case, and so it’s impossible to say if Scattergood encountered the questions herself. That usage isn’t even new; in his 1667 masterpiece Paradise Lost, John Milton made the parents of humanity into partners, placing in the ur-lover’s mouth, the mouth of Adam, speaking of Eve, this lament: “I stand Before my Judge … to accuse My other self, the partner of my life.”